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African fruit and veg exports face competition

26 Apr 2012

The reliability and the cost of Africa's cold chain supply chain was key to growing Africa's fruit and vegetable exports, as there is increasing competition from other regions such as Latin America, says Steve Cameron from the UK Business Council for Africa.

"There is plenty of SA and European experience available to help reduce the costs and improve the reliability of deliveries of the cold supply chain in Africa. What also needs to happen is that the productivity at the farm level has to be increased as yields in Africa are still well below those in Latin America," Cameron told I-Net Bridge/BusinessLIVE on the sidelines of the Cool Logistics Africa conference on Thursday.

Cameron said the privatisation and concessioning of African ports had given buyers and suppliers a wider choice of entry and exit points, but the capacity of ports had lagged demand, as African perishable food and flower exports had grown exponentially over the past decade.

"There are vested interests such as trade unions and domestic manufacturers that would prefer to have inefficient ports as that provides barriers to entry to imports, so the concessioning of Nigerian ports by President Obessanjo required immense political courage. That provided an example for other African politicians and we are heartened by the progress in improving logistics over the past few years," he concluded.

Source: I-Net Bridge

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